Dark Forces: Rogue Mission
by Hayabusa1138
Summary: Years after destroying the Dark Trooper Project and months after the Battle of Hoth, Rebel agent Jan Ors is sent on a dangerous mission to Coruscant without her partner, Kyle Katarn. Left alone on the Alliance dreadnaught, New Hope, Kyle is left with the feeling that his long time friend is walking into danger.
1. Prologue

*TRANSFER IN PROGRESS*

The base's computer beeped incessantly as the data located within transferred from the memory core to the data disk plugged in it. The transfer bar slowly moved forward on the screen, taking each centimeter seemingly at its leisure.

"I should have just taken the damn thing with me," Kyle Katarn said. His brown eyes darted back and forth from the screen to the door in front of him, blaster pistol raised up to it. The corpse of the base's commander sat sprawled out in the chair next to Kyle, the blaster wound in his chest still sent smoke up into the air.

Somewhere outside of that door the remaining stormtroopers of the base were gathering and preparing their defenses. Getting into this room had been tough enough. Getting out would be harder.

TRANSFER COMPLETE, the computer screen blinked. Kyle removed the datacard from the system and secured it in the side pocket of his brown leather jacket. He removed the comlink from his belt and thumbed it on. "Jan, I've got the database, time for a lift out of here." He holstered his blaster pistol and replaced it with the rifle hanging from his shoulder.

"Copy that, Kyle," her Alderaanian accented voice said.

He walked towards the door and leaned up against the wall. His hand hovered over the control panel, gloved fingers hovering millimeters over the console. The back of his head tingled in a weird form of intuition that usually meant that danger was close by. He dropped the blaster rifle and let it hang loose around his shoulder by the sling. One of the many thermal detonators that hanged from a belt on his waist came loose with a quick tug. The spherical grenade's activation switch clicked with an easy slide and the agent quickly opened the door with his free hand. With a certain predictability, the stormtroopers outside of the door opened fire, red-hot bolts of plasma filling the empty space. Kyle tossed the detonator behind him and huddled behind the wall as the sphere exploded.

The hallway beyond the door was littered with the mangled bodies of the six stormtroopers. He walked past them and through the durasteel corridors of the Imperial base, retracing his steps towards the roof of the three story installation. He stopped at a corner near the turbolift and spied beyond it. Three stormtroopers stood guarding the lift, their white plastoid armor clacking against the floor.

He rounded the corner and fired a quick burst from his rifle, the first volley taking down the closest two soldiers. The remaining one opened fire, opting for a fully automatic volley to get Kyle to retreat back behind cover. The first shots missed the rebel agent as he sidestepped into the corridor. A bright green light flashed in front of Kyle's eyes as one of the bolts managed to find its target, but was absorbed completely by his personal shields. He aimed down the sights of his rifle and fired. The shot hit the stormtrooper in the chest and sent the Imperial down into a clump.

A trio of three frantic beeps coming from his belt sounded throughout the hallway. "Spast," he cursed as he moved the opening of his nerf leather jacket aside to check the shield generator. Another shot like the one that he had just taken wouldn't be blocked and he had used the spare power cell for it less than 15 minutes previously.

The door opened at the end of the brief turbolift ride to an empty hallway. Kyle stepped off of the lift tentatively, blaster rifle poking around the corner. He stepped out into the corridor and quickly glanced both ways. He turned left and headed towards the rooftop access hatch that he had entered the facility on, passing the bodies of the stormtroopers slain in the first minutes of the mission.

In the distance behind him, he could hear the sound of several pairs of boots as they raced down the hallway. "Jan, I've got company," he said through his comlink as he ran down the hallway.

"You mean I have to save your hide _again_?" she said. He could picture her grinning in his mind's eye. "I didn't sign up for this, you know?" Kyle didn't reply, saving his breath as he kept racing down the hallway. Behind him, he could hear the plastoid boots of the stormtroopers as they followed him. He ducked into a side room and reached the ladder that led to the roof. He climbed as quick as he could, blaster rifle clanking as it hit the side of his body armor. He reached the top of the ladder as he hastened his way to the door.

Cool evening air hit Kyle's face as he opened the door to the roof of the building. Hovering about four meters above the roof was a brown light freighter. A beak-like nose of the craft faced him and continued down the length of the ship until jutting off into two wing-like modular engines to the sides, twin tails emerged diagonally from the back. A large twin-barreled blaster cannon was underslung from its belly. "Kyle, do me a favor," Jan said as Kyle ran towards the ship. "Hit the deck."

He dove to the ground, skidding on his stomach for a meter as the door behind him opened. Above him the _Moldy Crow_ 's four laser cannons opened fire, bathing the rooftop in flashes of red light. The blaster cannon fired a lone shot that sent a flare of heat as the bolt exploded. The illumination died down and the only sound upon the rooftop was the thrumming of the _Crow_ 's repulsorlifts. Kyle stood up from the roof of the Imperial base and brushed the dust off of himself.

"As always, I owe you one."

The _Crow_ lowered closer to the roof as the boarding ramp swung open. "Well, you're certainly in debt."


	2. Chapter 1

**CHAPTER 1**

The hangar of the Rebel dreadnaught _New Hope_ smelled of a century of spilled oil and fuel. All around the light Corellian-made freighter, the other ships were being repaired and refueled for whatever missions lay ahead for their pilots. Kyle Katarn walked down the _Moldy Crow_ 's short boarding ramp and wiped hydraulic fluid from his hands with a rag. It had taken three hours to install and the majority of the money he had earned in the last assignment, but the _Moldy Crow_ finally had a new hyperdrive motivator. He took the cloth towel and quickly ran it over the grey maintenance coveralls he wore, wiping off the pooled oil.

"Looks like you've been busy," Jan Ors said. Kyle looked up from his stained coveralls and saw her walk under the nose of a nearby X-wing and towards the _Crow._ Her usual field gear was gone, replaced by the blue shirt and khaki vest of the Alliance dress uniform.

"And you haven't been," he said. He flashed a quick smirk her way. "Convenient that you get called away to some meeting when I'm ready to upgrade the _Crow_. You leave me here to complete all the hard work by myself"

Her brown eyes shimmered in the hangar's bright lights as a feigned look of outrage crossed over her face. "Just like when you were 'too hurt' to help me fix her after Phaeda?"

"I got shot!" he said with a shrug.

"You call that heat blister a wound?" she said as she rose her right hand, a leather glove covering a metal prosthesis. "I did more after this than you did then."

He laughed and conceded defeat. Somehow she always had a way to get him to do that and judging by the smile on her face she knew it.

"As fun as this has been, I take it that you're not here just to give me a hard time," he said.

"No," she said. The grin on her face faded into the thin-lipped expression she wore when things had gotten serious. "I'm just here to say that if you get a mission in the next month or so, you're going to be on your own."

"Was that what that meeting was about?" he asked. "You've got something of your own lined up?"

"Shouldn't be that tough of one," she said as she gave him a reassuring smile that he noticed was slightly forced.

Kyle gestured to the ship to his left. "Well, if you need to use the _Crow_ , she's yours. You usually fly her, anyway."

"I appreciate it," she said. He could see the tan skin on her cheeks redden slightly. "But the _Crow_ would be little recognizable where I'm headed."

"Old stomping grounds?"

Jan shot him a frown. "Let's just leave it at that," she said. "If Mon Mothma knew I even hinted at that..."

Kyle nodded in understanding. He had worked with the Chief of State of the Rebellion as an aligned mercenary for over three years, but their initial first impression had been less than stellar. "Well, where ever you're going, take care."

"Judging from all I've seen?" she said. "Without me, you're the one who's going to need to be careful."

He watched her begin to walk away, their conversation over but with words left unsaid. "Jan," he said. She turned around and he thought he caught the briefest hint of apprehension on her face before quickly assuming a more neutral expression. "If you need help, you know where to reach me."

"I always do." She turned and walked away, a strange feeling entering the back of his mind. She was walking into trouble.

He walked out of the hangar and towards the crew quarters where the Alliance had assigned him a cabin. He tried to push the thought to the back of his head. Jan had gone on solo missions several times since they had first met and had always come back unharmed. He was worried about her, that was all, he thought.

The door to his quarters opened as he neared them. The room was small with a single cot against the far wall, storage compartments under the cot carried clothing, various personal effects and a thing or two that the Alliance didn't need to know that he had picked up during his missions. On the right wall was a small desk that was cluttered with holopad datacards. The datapad on the desk blinked with new electronic messages. Kyle sat down in the small chair and picked up his datapad.

The first message was sent by an Admiral in the fleet, the one that had hired Jan and him to retrieve the database from the Imperial facility. It was a simple thank you message for providing the information that led to the safe retrieval of his daughter. The second one was more interesting to him. A black-plated 3PO droid stood in the recording, golden photoreceptors glowing.

"Sentient Katarn," the droid said in its half-monotone voice. "I must regret to inform you that despite all of the searching and research done by myself and my subordinates, I was not able to find the name of the commander of the Imperial raid on Sulon that took place three and a half years ago. Indeed, no such raid has even officially surfaced..." Kyle cut the recording off and cursed under his breath.

The raid had happened. He had seen the vid images of it himself. Jan had shown it to him before he had even joined the Alliance, back when he was still a young Imperial officer, fresh out of the academy. He had watched as the "Rebel" troops moved with Imperial precision, shooting down both combatants and unarmed men and women alike.

He could hear the concern in Jan's voice as he wanted to view the rest of it. He should have listened to her, for there hadn't been a day in the nearly four years since that he didn't see the severed head of his father in his mind's eye.

Kyle dropped the datapad onto his desk where it settled with a loud clatter. Four years and he was still no closer to finding out who commanded the attack, nor to finding any sort of ways to pay back Jan even half of what she deserved for telling him the truth.

His gut dropped slightly at the thought of her and the nagging feeling in his head that he still couldn't shake. Something wasn't right about her upcoming mission, he knew it.


	3. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER TWO**

The cockpit of the Sienar-made courier was spacious compared to her normal confines in a ship, Jan Ors thought as she lounged in her pilot's chair. The sleek, rectangular control panels were aligned neatly: a pilot's station in front of the bow viewscreen and a copilot's console to the right. The emptiness of the console was strange to her, as was the silence throughout the entire ship.

She shook the thought out of her head. It wasn't the time for such thoughts, not with such an important mission to be done. She stood from her seat and walked back to her cabin. It was several hours until the ship reached its next waypoint and days before reaching Coruscant. The perfect time to plan.

The transport's small cabin was spartan: a small storage cubicle to her right was crowded against a narrow cot. On the cot were the two small storage cubes containing everything she needed for Jan Ors to become Leessa Shalmohar, a young Imperial Intelligence agent enrolling in the Imperial Academy of Interrogation. It was a deceptively sterile name for what many of her fellow rebels and even some Imperials had named the School of Torturers.

She opened the larger of the two crates and rifled through the white Imperial uniforms and found the circular holoemitter hidden within. She thumbed the emitter on and studied the human male that appeared in the flat image. He stood around 1.8 meters tall, the writing said to the side, and wore a commander's rank insignia upon the left breast of his uniform. He wore his shoulder-length black hair slicked back behind an oval-shaped face whose attractiveness hid the vicious reputation he had acquired. A thin line of black beard followed his jaw line before expanding into a neatly trimmed goatee. Blue eyes shined with a hint of malice and ambition. Leco Daam, she thought, the head of the school and a prized pupil of Director Ysanne Isard. Rumors amongst Alliance intelligence, all from third hand sources at their most verifiable, suggested the two had some sort of romantic connection as well. He was known throughout Intel as a formidable, if cocky, agent and a potentially large threat in the future, especially if the rumors had merit. It was these reasons and more that Alliance intelligence had tasked Jan Ors with infiltrating his academy and killing him.

The Imperial uniforms were removed from the crate and carefully placed onto the cot. She fished her left fingers along the bottom of the crate, quickly finding the five barely noticeable pressure plates. The false bottom came loose, revealing the gear that she believed that she would need to complete her mission: two holdout blaster pistols, a quarter of a kilogram of a low grade explosive and a detonator, a folded up cloth containing five non-metal throwing knives, an electro-garrote and an electric toothbrush. _Well_ , she thought as she double-checked the sensor scrambler that kept all of it hidden from prying eyes, _maybe not all of it would be needed..._

She replaced all of the gear into the bottom of the crate and put the false bottom back into place, followed by all but one of the Imperial uniforms. She placed the crates on the floor next to the cubicle with the intention of unpacking sometime soon. She removed the orange tie from her silky black hair and let it fall to just past her shoulders. The Alliance uniform was the next to go and was dropped into a lump that was destined for the ship's garbage incinerator, quickly replaced with the Imperial uniform as her real self flowed off of her and Leessa Shalmohar replaced it.

Leessa, she thought, was Kuati and from a middle class family that had died while on a business trip to Alderaan. That part, she thought bitterly, wasn't that far from the truth. She had joined Imperial Intelligence before then and had a middling but promising career stationed in the Outer Rim amongst smugglers before applying for additional training in interrogation.

The door out of her cabin opened in front of her as she walked out into the deserted common room. She took a seat at the small faux wooden table and grabbed a piece of Ithorian fruit from the bowl in the center of it. "He offered to let me use the _Crow_ ," she said in a perfect Kuati accent. The gesture shouldn't have surprised her; she was the one who generally flew the ship anyway, but for some reason it had. The offer combined with what his last words to her were-or could have been. Ever since Danuta she had been dreading that he would admit his obvious feelings towards her, and she would have to do the same.

No. The thought sounded so loudly in her head that Jan was momentarily surprised that she hadn't said it out loud. She couldn't allow herself to get so close to him-to anybody-at the moment. Not in that way; not after so many of her comrades and friends had already given their lives for the Alliance. And not for the fact that even after all of this time Mon Mothma still didn't fully trust him. No matter how much she loved him, everything told her that she couldn't.

Leco Daam was always uncomfortable when Ysanne Isard was in his office. Despite their mutual attraction to each other, the woman's reputation always preceded her. He feigned a smile at her. It wasn't each other's attractiveness or personalities that had led them to each other, he knew, but rather their ambitions. He needed a way to ascend higher into the echelons of Imperial Intelligence, and Isard needed someone that could spread loyalty to her throughout the entire organization.

Her eyes bored holes into him, the blue freezing him where he stood while the red burned its way through his defensive layers to stare at his true self. "Your new class arrives tomorrow." A statement, not a question.

"A promising group of students, if I may say so," he said. He retrieved his datapad from the corner of his desk and handed it to her. The director took the datapad and quickly studied its contents. All fourteen of the students, some of the Empire's best and most promising intelligence agents, were listed within, bios full of praise and constructive criticism from Daam's colleagues.

"Very promising," she said. Her face remained expressionless despite the praise of his hand-picked selections. "Yet..." His soul chilled as she looked up from the datapad at him. With the quick movement of a finger she ejected the datapad's card and placed it into a pocket of her crimson uniform.

"You don't approve of one of them?" he said. He braced himself for the stern berating that was bound to come next, or worse. Isard wasn't the kind of person that tolerated failure amongst her subordinates, or even her own family if the rumors about her father were true.

"A hunch, commander," she said. "One involving info that's above your security clearances." She handed the datapad back to him roughly, the thin metal case slapping against his stomach. "Keep an eye on your students, Daam," she said as she turned around. "I'll be looking deeper myself."

"If there's something about one of my students," he said, grinning deeply, "I'll find it. It shouldn't be any problem."

"Leave it to me," Isard said. "You're too close. You might alert them and flush them out before we're ready." Daam's face dropped. It had been one of the first times that her criticisms had stung so badly yet the reasons for it rung true to him. If something were up with one of the students, he would be far too close to the matter to investigate it without raising suspicion.

"I'll just keep my eyes open, then," he said.

"Good." Isard stepped through the open door. Before it hissed shut, Daam heard her parting words. "You're learning quickly."


	4. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER THREE**

The private office of Chief of State Mon Mothma in the _New Hope_ were spacious, an opulent reminder of the glory days of the dreadnaught when the officer in charge had only pirates to worry about. Faded banners still hung on the walls, left there by a staff too worried about more important matters than decorating. Mon Mothma sat behind her wooden desk, dressed in her typical white gown and consulting one of several datapads that piled up beside her. An aide stood next to the wall, a blond woman whose lavender eyes scrutinized Kyle for a second before turning her attention back to the Chief of State.

"Kyle," Mon Mothma said. She placed the datapad down and gave him her full attention. "You commed me last night and said that you wished to speak to me?"

It had been an insane thought, but one that Kyle felt that he needed to take. For three days the feeling that Jan was heading into some sort of trouble wouldn't leave him. "I'm here to talk about Jan Ors."

Mon Mothma's auburn eyebrows raised slightly. "She's away on a mission right now," she said. "And you already know that." Whether it was the unchanged look on his face that gave Kyle away to her or the possibility that she had seen the security camera footage from the hangar he didn't know. "So that makes me wonder why you're here."

"Do you have some way to get in touch with her?" Kyle asked. "I think she might be in trouble."

Mon Mothma's blue eyes widened in curiosity before quickly narrowing. "Do you know something?"

"Just a feeling." The Chief of State nodded slowly while Kyle thought he caught a quick look of recognition upon the face of her aide.

"I see," Mon Mothma said. "I'm fairly certain that your 'feeling' is just worry over her being on a mission by herself. You've seen how she can handle herself in difficult situations, so there's no need to."

Jan Ors could take care of herself, that Kyle knew easily. Together, they had taken out so many of Jabba's hired thugs after the _Moldy Crow_ was captured by the Hutt's yacht that the bounty hunters had to drop stun grenades through the docking ring to take them out. It wasn't that which made him nervous. It was something... _else_. A tickling in the back of his head that still hadn't gone away.

"Was there anything else?"

"No," Kyle said. He stepped out of the office, humiliated but thankful that he wasn't immediately dragged away to the medbay for a psych evaluation.

 _Three meters away and nothing to do about it_ , Jan Ors thought as she watched Leco Daam conduct one of the first lectures on how to properly interrogate prisoners. The lecture hall was standard Imperial fare: the same uniform gray metal walls that all Imperial bases and ships used, curved rows of black plastoid desks that surrounded a small wooden lectern and a holoprojector. She was in the second row, surrounded by thirteen other Imperial Intelligence agents. Complying to Imperial doctrine, the agents were all human but from a variety of worlds. She was one of two women in the class.

"I hope that you all have picked up a little of Huttese in your training," Daam continued with his lecture. "Galactic Basic, Huttese and Durese are the three most common languages spoken in the Empire, in that order. While translator droids can be useful, the context of their words in time with nonverbal communication can often be missed."

It was basic stuff, Jan thought, something that any Intel agent with even the slightest hint of heading into interrogation should know.

"If you must use a translator droid, it will be an Imperial Intelligence approved protocol droid," Daam said. He switched the image on the holoemitter to one of a humanoid droid, the covered eye sockets large and slightly bulbous. "This is an RA-7 protocol droid. Most of you have seen them by now. They're practically everywhere in Imperial service." Daam left the lectern and paced throughout the front of the room.

"The RA-7s will translate only a few sentences behind the prisoner and will replicate their tone of voice to the best of its abilities." Daam stopped in front of Jan. "Shalmohar," he said, pointing to her in the second row of seats. "What's a drawback of using this method?"

"If the sentence structure of the alien language differs from Basic, the translation can be compromised." Daam nodded and continued on with the lecture. He was doing that to everyone, Jan noticed. Asking students about flaws in techniques that he had mentioned. Most of the students questioned didn't have any idea about them, as they should have. She would have feigned ignorance to join them if the flaw in question hadn't been completely obvious to anyone with any basic knowledge of alien languages.

Daam was probing his students; that much was obvious. To what purpose, she didn't know. Finding potential protégés or other star students was one possibility but the other reason sent a small chill down her spine. He could be probing for a rebel infiltrator. The fear that the mission had somehow become compromised flipped her stomach upside down.

"As to the subject of droids being used in our line of work," Leco Daam continued. The holoprojector image switched from the humanoid droid with the vaguely insectoid face to a far more familiar droid. It was spherical with a diameter slightly larger than a human head, with a smaller sphere on the top of its northern hemisphere. Jan had seen enough of the IT-O interrogation droids in her single lifetime than anyone ever wanted to, most of them thankfully from the other end.

"I know what you're all thinking. 'When do we get to use this?' You've all heard about its reputation," Daam said. He turned to a dark-skinned male human in the last row. "Cedral, what do you know about this droid?"

Cedral stood up and addressed the rest of the group. "It carries various truth serums and toxins, the most used lowers the subjects pain threshold."

"Walking feels like you're on shards of transparisteel, yes," Daam said. "Among other things." The instructor continued to walk throughout the small room. "I was told, when I was in your boots here, that the best use for this droid is to simply have it. Rebels, pirates and other dissidents know what this is and they fear it." His icy eyes scanned the room. "You show this to a rebel, and most of them crack right away."


	5. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER FOUR**

The student lounge of the academy was crowded. Every single interrogation student were within the confines of the large room, even the two that had to be shuttled in from nearby hotels. Jan Ors sat in one of the small couches in the middle of the room, datapad in hand. Studying the layout of an Imperial facility was risky, but her absence would only draw more attention to herself than she really needed to have.

Newo Tenes was the center of attention, as always. The burly agent was joking in front of the others with Mias, a much skinnier agent. The two had made fast friends at the academy, but they would stab the other in the back if they needed to; such was Imperial politics. Cedral was sitting in a nearby chair, eating from a bag of crisps and watching the pair mock fight. Switch the uniforms and add a bit more color to the barren walls of the lounge and she could have been in any rec room in the Alliance.

"Mind if I sit here?" A somewhat high pitched voice startled Jan from her study. With a subtle movement, she changed the screen from a map of the base to a bland piece of Holofiction. She looked up from her datapad and saw a thin framed man, his light brown hair jutting wildly down from his head. Donlat Tascel, she remembered, a droid specialist.

"Go ahead," she said. Jan eyed him warily as he sat down. Donlat shifted his attention from the HoloScreen on the wall to the playful fight, where Mias was hanging for his life from the back of Newo. He continued this for minutes while she flipped through the novel.

Jan had just stopped paying active attention to him when he spoke again. "I saw you in the lecture the other day, you major in droids, too?"

She lowered her datapad and looked at him, in the quickest of seconds trying to determine if he was digging for information or just a curious colleague. "They have their uses, but I'm mainly looking on how to do field interrogations," she said with the shake of her head. "Not a whole of chances to work with droids there."

"Field interrogations?" His brow furrowed slightly. "Like commandos?"

She flashed him a knowing smile. "It's classified." Jan waited for a response, muscles rejecting the urge to twitch, mind urging the other student to drop the line of questioning.

Donlat laughed. "Wouldn't be the Empire without keeping secrets from itself!"

 _Oh, if you only knew..._ Jan thought. "Secrecy keeps security," she said.

His eyes dropped in thought. "That's the Prefsbelt Sector's branch motto, isn't it?"

"Theirs and half the Mid Rim's. I had a superior, years ago, who spent some time there."

"Most of mine have barely set foot out of the Core," Donlat said. "And they like to look down their noses at anyone that isn't."

Jan gave a polite nod. She had seen and heard how the Imperials divided even the "high culture" of humans that they so loved, splitting them by gender and by area. Teasing at the very least and outright discrimination at the worse.

Donlat paused. "I didn't mean to imply that... You're Kuati, aren't you?"

"Not all Kuati nobles are so _delicate_ about criticism." She laid her accent on as thick as she dared. "I take it that you're not from the Core?"

"The Colonies region." He shrugged. "Too Core for the Rim and too Rim for the Core."

A burst of laughter interrupted the conversation as a flash of movement caught the corner of Jan's eye. She turned around and saw that the mock fight between Newo and Mias had ended in a spectacular failure. The two combatants had tripped over the corner of a chair and were currently laying in the shattered remains of a caf table. The two seemed more amused than hurt, and joined in on the laughing.

Jan shook her head, a bemused smile on her lips. It was _exactly_ like some of the Alliance rec rooms she'd been in.

The interrogation room slowly emptied of the students within. Mias, followed by an uncomfortable looking Donlat, and the others. Leco stood next to the transparisteel window, watching as the drugged rebel inside lay on the table, unconscious. The interrogation droid hovered over the body, testing vital signs as the interrogator within waited to clear the room.

Cedral remained in the room along with Leesa, the former walking up towards him while the other hovered towards the back of the room.

"Commander," Cedral said. "When do you know when to use the interrogation droid? You said in one of your lectures that even having them could be the best weapon in our arsenal."

"I did. This interrogation was to show how to use a droid in your interrogations. Knowing when to use it is just something that an individual agent has to find out for themselves."

"So, there's not an exact science?"

Leco nodded. He had watched everyone's reactions to the torture as they had observed it, seeing how some of them watched in disgust, impartial detachment, and one with barely concealed glee. Cedral had been one of the few within the sweet spot of horror and detachment.

"Only for each agent. Once you're out in the field, you'll be able to figure that out for yourself."

They continued their conversation for minutes before Cedral had cleared up any confusion that he had over the process. Leco turned to look for Leesa as Cedral left, only to discover that the woman had left.

Inside of the interrogation room, the prisoner was slowly coming to. Light-colored hair that hadn't been washed or cut in months clumped up on the table. He had been a rebel, a member of a cell that had operated on Coruscant itself, and captured and sent to Lusankya. Isard regularly shipped him these cast offs from her own programs for demonstrations.

He waited until the prisoner had been fully removed from the room before leaving, headed for his office.


	6. Chapter 5

**CHAPTER FIVE**

Dreadnaughts were notorious for being crew-extensive. So desperate for crew that in the waning days of the Old Republic they had been virtually scrapped as ships, or had been heavily crewed by droids in some of the less-essential areas. It was in one of these less-needed areas that Kyle Katarn paced. It was at the beginning of the night shift and the cargo hold was empty of the droids that normally loaded and unloaded foodstuffs and various other needed goods. The message that he had received that morning had been short and told him to meet them here at this hour.

He walked through the narrow hallways of stacked metal crates, each step of his echoing throughout the room. The memory of the "smuggler's" ship on Cal-Seti came to mind, a maze of cargo containers where every step could have held an enemy. He wasn't expecting an enemy today, but still came prepared. Underneath his leather coat and between the tan-white shirt was the holster holding his blaster pistol. He adjusted the holster as he turned a corner and entered an open area in the hold.

The clearing was four meters across and just as wide, the cargo crates that were slightly taller than Kyle himself were stacked three high. Passages a meter and a half jutted off in each of the four cardinal directions. Standing in front of the fore passageway was Mon Mothma's aide from the day before. She was wearing a white Chandrilan-style robe that was trimmed in yellow.

"You said that you had a 'feeling' about your partner," she said. She was leaning slightly against a column of crates, her lavender eyes-almost a deep violet in the lighting-continued to bore uncomfortably into him. "Describe it."

Kyle looked around the cargo hold again, scanning the tops of the crates and the catwalks above. "You get to the point, don't you?" She remained silent and Kyle shrugged. "All right. It's in the back of my head and it won't leave. It's not worry like Mon Mothma thought, it's just..."

"Like you know it's going to happen," she said. "I know someone that gets these feelings a lot. He tries to hide them from me, but I can tell. Trust them, Katarn."

"So, Jan _is_ in trouble?"

"I don't know," she said. "I do know that she's in a very dangerous place for a rebel right now."

Kyle gestured towards her. "And that is?"

She smiled slightly, tauntingly almost. "I'm not risking my job further by telling you more, Katarn. Only that you may be right. Trust your feelings."

He scoffed, the sound echoing throughout the cargo hold. "That's it?" he said. "You call me here in the middle of the night just for that?" He shook his head and let loose a single sarcastic chuckle. "Well, thanks a lot, you've certainly made this whole thing a hell of a lot easier." He walked quickly to the entrance way through which he came before quickly turning around.

"Next time Mon Mothma wants to waste my time, I suggest that she do it herself." He turned around and stormed out of the clearing. "And say hi to 'vision boy' for me," he shouted as he turned a corner.

The uselessness of the encounter burned in his mind as he made his way towards his quarters. A clandestine meeting that resulted in an aide for Mon Mothma, who knew everything about Jan's mission, only telling him that he may be on the right track. "She's in a dangerous place for a rebel right now," he muttered under his breath. Where wasn't a dangerous place for them right now? The Alliance was busy regrouping after the debacle of Hoth and the Imperials were busy consolidating their power.

"Old stomping grounds..." The thought of his words days ago to her came bubbling back into his mind. It combined with other memories and thoughts: the smile that was a little too reassuring when she said that it would be a simple mission, the _Moldy Crow_ being far more recognizable than she'd like for the place she was going. Nar Shaddaa sprang to his mind.

They had first gone to the Smuggler's Moon of Nal Hutta nearly three years previously during their mission to stop the Dark Trooper Project. Captured by Jabba the Hutt and shooting through the overgrown slug's private space yacht certainly did little to get onto his good side.

The only other option was... The thought sent a slight chill down his spine. A very dangerous place to be a rebel and also somewhere that the _Crow_ would be recognizable was... Imperial Center itself. Coruscant was the soul of the Empire and the site of one of his most hectic missions where he had to decode the navacard that he had retrieved on Nar Shaddaa.

It was the option that made the most sense. He had narrowed it down a planet, at least he hoped he had. Now to find one woman on a planet containing a trillion beings. Now in the safety of his own quarters he pulled out the datapad from its pocket in his coat and replied to the aide's original message. WHERE ON CORUSCANT?

YOU STILL HAVE A LOT TO LEARN ABOUT HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS was the reply he received the next morning.

Isard's main office was large even for its contemporaries and opulently decorated. The normally grey durasteel walls were covered with various tapestries depicting scenes of Imperial glories. A large holographic map of the galaxy covered the north wall, various hotspots such as Gall, Golrath and the Sepan system were highlighted.

Ysanne Isard sat at her desk, the day's reports from various agents stationed in numerous sectors and systems throughout the galaxy all read by subordinates and the more pressing matters forwarded directly to her. There were traitors at work in the Empire, a crime lord getting delusions of grandeur right under their noses, and a potential infiltration into Imperial Intelligence itself.

She watched the feed from the Academy of Interrogation on the flat-screened projector on her darkwood desk. Daam was instructing his pupils on how to properly interrogate infantry at the moment, telling them what questions to ask to get the proper results. Daam asked a burly brownish-red haired man about an interrogation technique that no one of the pupil's experience would be able to reasonably answer. She watched the students as the pupil tried and failed to answer the question. No one gave any indication of knowing the answer, nor did Isard really expect any of them to. Any rebel agent, if there actually was one, that was chosen to infiltrate Intelligence would know that they were being probed. Yet Daam was not doing that bad of a job, she thought. Especially since she had told him to leave the majority of the investigation to her.

She turned to the datapad in front of her and thumbed in a few quick commands. The burly student was Newo Tenes, a Coruscanti with two years of service to Imperial Intelligence. A graduate of the Imperial military academy of Raithal with high marks and an Intel occupation test grading. His background checked out as well.

She had been through the roster a dozen times already and had failed to find out what exactly had made her so suspicious when she had read through it the first time. Every single applicant had proper credentials and a background that checked out, so it was strange to her that... Isard froze in her chair, the faintest hint of a smile curving on her lips. It was _Strange_... The faint memories of an Imperial Intelligence agent under that name slowly floated their way to the surface of her mind. She exited the menu she was on and pulled up the records from the vast archives at her disposal, searching for the name that had come to mind. She input the last name into the database and soon the record appeared.

A tan-skinned woman in her early-twenties appeared on the screen, long black hair pulled into a tail that fell to her mid back. Jan Strange had served in Imperial Intelligence as an agent for nearly two years and had a certain knack for capturing rebels. Isard looked back at the screen showing the classroom and viewed the woman fitting the description closely typing notes into her own datapad. "Shalmohar," Isard said.


	7. Chapter 6

**CHAPTER SIX**

Ysanne Isard's holographic head loomed large in Leco Daam's office. The shading of the large windows overlooking the cityscape beyond was on, leaving the large hologram to illuminate the room in a bright blue glow. "You're certain?" Leco Daam said. The administrator was sitting at his desk, a datapad in hand.

Isard nodded. "Most of the records of Jan Strange were destroyed years ago, before I assumed control of this office. More than likely she did it herself before she returned to the Rebels. The Empire is lucky that I am more meticulous in backups than my father was. Even then, I almost missed it."

"Well, then," Daam said. "I'll have my forces go and arrest her immediately."

"No," Isard said. The voice was harsh and quick. "We have to be patient and when it happens it has to be certain. She's here for some reason and she may have backup waiting."

"Well, if she is Strange, then she's here to kill either you or myself. She'd already know the standard interrogation procedure. It hasn't changed much" He paced around his desk before sitting down again, glancing down at the datapad in front of him. The memory of her waiting after an interrogation demonstration chilled his blood. "You mentioned backup, Madam Director?"

"Are you familiar with the Imperial Security Operations fiasco?" Isard asked.

Daam nodded. It had been a little over two years since a lone rebel agent had somehow made their way into the Imperial Security Operations building and used the decryption machine deep in the center of it to crack the code on some datacard that he carried. Over half of the base's security complement of Stormtroopers and Imperial Navy soldiers were killed by the agent. The next morning, after word of the massacre had reached higher echelons, the building's commander was personally "scolded" by Lord Vader. Intel always joked about the assault, half-serious chuckles that such a thing could never happen to them.

"According to the files that I've pulled together, she is a known accomplice to the rebel agent that was responsible for that massacre. Security will have to be increased after her capture."

"I'll let my security team know," Daam said. He flashed a cocky smile at Isard, confident that their department's boasts would prove true.

"You'll need more," Director Isard said. "I'll be sending in an extra platoon and a few squads of stormtroopers after you capture her, just in case her partner is in the area. Come up with a plan and let me know about it before the end of the day." The holoprojector cut out as she ended the call, and the shade on the windows retracted back into the wall. The midday sun shone into the office.

Daam stood up from his desk and paced throughout the office. A rebel spy in their midst. He had first entertained the thought when Isard had found something suspicious in his class a week previously, but to hear the validation was a triumph. He grinned heavily and poured a glass of Corellian brandy from the bar on the opposite wall from the window. He took a sip and relished the slight burning of the alcohol on his throat. He opened the comm channel to his security personnel and sat his drink back down onto the bar. An idea was already forming inside of his mind.

Fifteen minutes later, eighteen Imperial Stormtroopers stood inside of Leco Daam's office. They were dressed in finely crafted and polished plastoid armor, the lights of the office reflecting off of the white plates.

"We have a rebel in our midst," he said. "Leessa Shalmohar. Director Isard and I are coming up with a plan to take her into custody with a minimal risk of casualties. We have no idea of her capabilities or contingency plans, so she'll have to be taken by surprise. You'll be ready to report to me at a moment's notice when we're ready for us to proceed."

"Yes, sir!" they said in unison.

"I'm confident in each of your abilities, men, and I know that you'll be able to get the job done. Dismissed."

Leco turned his attention away from his troops as they walked out of his office and sat back down onto his desk. Resting his chin on his fist, he pulled up the schematic of the facility. His mind raced at the idea of what a rebel infiltrator might do if confronted. As spies, any laws of war that the Empire followed were forfeit and that desperation could lead to anything for a group of beings that were already full of surprises.

He zoomed in on the dormitories of his school, a dozen small rooms that surrounded a large common area. The unusually large number of students that he had received this year had led the agent to put two of his pupils in a nearby hotel and transport them via speeder every day. It was unfortunate, he mused, that his target had not been among them. Shalmohar's quarters were right in the middle of the northern wall and he had no intel at all on any defenses that the rebel may have put up. Visions of tripwires at the door with an attached explosive filled his mind along with thoughts of an automated blaster turret meeting his soldiers and tearing them to ribbons.

No, he thought. It couldn't be anything so grandiose or quick. Not when she was at the academy for some reason that remained irritatingly elusive. He could make an attempt to capture her in the middle of the night while she slept, but there was no guarantee of her being asleep at the time. Most agents staggered their sleep cycle around when on missions.

He placed that thought in the back of his mind and a turned to other options. Seizing her in the hallways or one of the many classrooms would ensure that she would be lightly armed, if at all, but the potential for collateral damage in the other intelligence agents was great. Leco leaned back against his chair and considered all of his options.

The Hope's Retreat was never the busiest bar on the ship. Of the two aboard the _New Hope_ , the majority of the Dreadnaught's crew preferred the service at the Alderaan's Peace. The bar never did lack for customers, however, as patrons kicked out of the other place mingled with those who considered the Peace too crowded or "fancy."

Kyle sat in a corner booth, nursing an Corellian ale and looking at his datapad. The vague hints given to him by Mon Mothma's aide had led him to the only obvious conclusion: the Imperial School of Torturers. Knots formed in his stomach at the thought of returning to Coruscant, twisting and turning in tandem with the alcohol. Jan was alone there, and in danger, and that thought eased any nerves that he had. She'd do the exact same for him, he knew, and the last cramps in his guts ceased.

HoloNet imagery of that area of Coruscant was highly classified by the Empire and unavailable via the standard planetary map channels used by the public. Alliance Intelligence had made due with what they could, taking sensor readings during illicit runs through the restricted airspace and hacking into the planet's satellites to give them the reconnaissance that they needed. It was one of these maps that he was studying now, viewing the open areas next to the building for landing zones for the _Crow_.

The _Moldy Crow_ was the reason he was sitting in the Retreat. Getting into the building and rescuing Jan was one thing, but it would all be for nothing if they didn't have a safe way off planet.

A young man with a youthful face entered the bar, clad in the orange flight suit of an X-wing pilot. The pilot spotted Kyle with a nod and headed in his direction.

"You must be Kyle," he said. "You wanted to speak to me?"

"Have a seat, Lt. Datch." Kyle motioned to the empty space across the table. "I have a certain mission proposition for you."

Tarrin Datch took his seat and ordered a Duro drink as the droid waiter approached him. "Special ops? That's surprising."

"From what I've heard, you can pilot a freighter just as well as you can a starfighter."

"I did all right on Hoth, but there wasn't that much Imperial resistance off planet by the time I lifted off."

Kyle shook his head. "I didn't mean on Hoth, I'm talking about above Duros with that rebel that was stashed aboard."

Tarrin's face lit up with recognition. "Not a lot of people here know about that."

"Well, she's in trouble again and I'm going to get her out of it." Jan's disastrous mission to Oulanne and her subsequent injury and illness was told to him shortly after his trips into the sewers of Anoat. He didn't believe that any mission could have been worse than having to swim through a river of sewage, but she had bested him on that.

"I can't do it without a pilot. From what she told me, you're the one that's going to be able to pull it off."

Tarrin's brown eyes narrowed slightly. "Just how bad is this trouble?"

Kyle gave a quick shrug. It wouldn't do him any favors to lie to the pilot any more than what he'd already planned on doing. "She was on a mission in Imperial Intelligence and there's reason to believe that her cover was blown."

A flash of worry crossed over the younger man's face. "And she's still alive?"

He didn't know the answer for that question. He didn't even know that she was truly in danger save for the fact that every single neuron in his brain screamed that somehow she was. "She's a spy, they want to get every single thing that they can from her. She's already in a school for interrogation."

"The School of Torturers?" Tarrin shivered and took a long drink from his brandy. "Who else is on the team?"

"I work alone."

"Even for this?"

"Especially for this," Kyle said. "Too many people would bring half the Imperial Army onto us, and that won't be good."

"Jan Ors got me into this Rebellion," Tarrin said. "I met a lot of good friends here while I would have still been working for my parents on our space station. I'm in."

Kyle drained the last bit of ale in his glass. "Good. There's still a few things that I'll have to do. Request leave if you have it and I'll keep in touch." He stood from his seat.

"Leave? If I'm being reassigned why do I need to take leave?"

Kyle scrambled for a quick comeback. "Look, these kinds of missions..."

Tarrin frowned and shook his head. The pilot lowered his voice. "Aren't exactly authorized, are they?"

"No." Kyle sat back down, shoulders slumped slightly.

Tarrin Datch chuckled. "No one would risk their career for this?"

"You're the first person I asked. I needed a good pilot who might help and I remembered your name coming up."

Tarrin stared into his glass for nearly a minute before quickly shrugging some unvocalized thought off of his shoulders. He extended his hand toward the agent. "Force help me if I'm making a big mistake, but I'm still in."


	8. Chapter 7

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p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"She sat down in the dark gray chair, the metallic fingers on her right hand resting next to the blaster pistol on the stand, electric sensors in the fingertips providing a modicum of tactile sensation. Her mind screamed at her to grab her scrambled comlink and tell Trip Home that she had possibly been uncovered and to prepare her a trip back to Alliance territory. /p  
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p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"The rational part of her brain cut in, warning her against the natural sentient fight or flight reaction. If Leco was alarmed by something or alerted to an intruder in the school, the trail may not lead to her. If it did, it may take the methodical Imperial at least a week to uncover all of the traces that it was actually her. He didn't have a week, only two days at the very most. She looked around her quarters and analyzed the tactical options just in case. /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"Satisfied that she was a safe as she could be, she leaned back in her chair and consulted her datapad. There, studying the maps of the area that were accessible to an Imperial Intelligence agent like Leessa Shalmohar, Jan Ors plotted her escape from her sniper's nest./p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"***/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"The night sky of Coruscant was an inkblot outside of the window of Leco Daam's office. The multitude of surrounding buildings glittered like the jewel that gave the planet its name, tangerine-colored lights drowning out the stars above. /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"The officer stood in front of that window, gazing out into the cityscape. Nearly two decades of his life had passed before he had seen a city even a thousandth of this size, only oceans and small sandy archipelagos as far as his eyes could see. His field of vision was filled now with incandescent buildings, speeders and the red warning lights of low hanging skyhooks./p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"It was order out in the night. The buildings arranged in their own specific way, the skylanes running just so. It was order that he had joined the Empire for, to keep the galaxy safe from the corruption that had doomed the Republic. The rebels were a cancer within that order, working under the sight of those that would bring peace to galaxy in defense of a status quo that had ceased to work a millennium ago./p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"That cancer was now in his school. He had been teaching her everything that he knew about Imperial interrogation techniques while she soaked the information up and waited for the opportunity to kill Director Isard, him, or even both. After she was done with her task she'd return to her treasonous friends and let them know how to withstand interrogation and go on to kill even more innocents./p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;""Do you understand how difficult it is to have this job?"/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"The security guard in the room shook his head, the gesture seen through the reflection of Leco's office in the window. "No, sir."/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"Vanet was a young Stormtrooper officer, recently out of the Academy. He held his white helmet under his arm, a black body glove pulled over his head, leaving only his face visible. Most importantly, Vanet was his man, not Isard's./p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;""There are a dozen people here, some of the best that Imperial Intelligence has, and one Rebel who will get very, very desperate to stay alive."/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;""We've already sequestered Newo from his quarters, sir. Do you want us to abort the mission?"/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"Leco looked past his widened eyes and slightly open mouth into the city. "No," he said. He checked the chrono on his wrist, 0123. "Have your troops start the attack."/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"Vanet placed his helmet in both of his hands and slipped it over his head. A quick salute followed. "Yes, sir!" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;" /p  
p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px;" /p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: #141414; font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.5333px; text-align: justify;"The filtered voice's reverberations faded along with the lieutenant's footsteps, leaving Leco alone in the room once more. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before slowly letting it out, waiting for the news of the attack's success or failure to reach him./p 


	9. Chapter 8

**CHAPTER EIGHT**

The repulsorsled issued a low hum as it glided over the floor of the _New Hope_. On the flat bed of the hovering craft was a thin crate nearly a meter and a half long. Kyle Katarn pushed it through the busy hangar, watching as the technicians and other members of the deck crew moved to avoid him.

"What's in the crate?" Tarrin Datch said. Kyle rounded a _Barloz_ freighter and came into view of his ship.

"Something I'd rather have and not need than need and not have." He engaged the sled's air brakes and opened the ramp of the freighter for them both.

The ramp led to a small airlock with two hatches to the stern and bow of the craft. Kyle pointed to the room behind them. "Quick tour: hyperdrive and cargo bay are through there. If you go in, do _not_ touch anything in the armory."

"I hope I don't have to," the pilot said.

"Good." Kyle left the sled in the airlock and walked through the bow door. It opened into a three meter wide corridor that took up around half of the ship's length. He pointed out the ship's refresher, and the food and water conservator.

Near the door leading to the cockpit of the ship were two bunks set into the bulkhead, an overhead compartment over each of them. He pointed to the starboard cot. "That one's Jan's, you can use it for now."

Tarrin placed his own bag on the cot. His head tilted slightly and mouth furling slightly downward. "What happens when she's back on board?"

Kyle shrugged. "I don't know, I didn't really think that through." He paused and opened up the storage compartment above his own bunk. "We've got plenty of extra blankets and the chairs in the cockpit aren't that uncomfortable."

"Thanks..."

Kyle ignored the pilot's complaint and passed through the door to the cockpit. The large, narrow control center had two command consoles behind each other, the rear station offset from the front.

A discarded pair of pilot's goggles were draped across the headrest of the stern seat. Large and with polarized optics that made the lenses nearly pitch black, they were exactly where Jan had left them after their last mission.

He took his usual seat at the front of the craft and began the process of starting the engines. "Anything I can do?" Tarrin asked as he sat in the remaining seat.

"Transfer gravity and life support from the _Hope_ to us and disengage the docking clamp.

The young pilot studied the controls in front of him for a few seconds before getting to work. Miniscule air vents in the ship came to life with a barely audible hum. Too audible.

"Run a quick diagnostic on the air filters," Kyle said. His mouth tightened into a line. Now was a hell of a time for something on the _Crow_ to break down.

A few minutes passed as the computer on board went through their search for any problems. "It says they're running at 98.3% efficiency," Tarrin reported. Nearly a quarter of a percent higher than what they normally ran.

Kyle put the thought in the back of his mind and finished the tasks left to do on the preflight checklist. The newness of it was the problem, he thought. In his almost four years working with the Alliance, he had either been alone on missions or with Jan. Another pilot, necessary as he may be, chafed at him.

The _Moldy Crow_ lifted off of the hangar deck of the _New Hope_ minutes later, beginning its journey to Coruscant.

The chrono on her stand read 0130, yet sleep was the furthest thing from Jan Ors' mind at the moment. The agent had begun to stagger her sleep cycles once again, sleeping for a few hours before waking. The extra security that Leco Daam had the previous afternoon had led her to step up on her own safety.

She sat in the room's only chair, eyes on the datapad she held in one hand. The print version of Coruscant's daily news was always boring, both the local and galactic news filled with whatever the Empire wanted its citizens to know. That's where the Alliance came in, taking a cue from the old Separatist HoloNet Shadowfeeds, they had set up comm centers throughout the galaxy, mostly on asteroids near large inhabited systems.

There was no news to be had on the HoloNet, however. Coruscant had long been deemed as far too dangerous to even try to set up a comm center near. The local Rebel cells made due with leaflets printed on flimsiplast.

Still, even obvious Imperial propaganda was better than nothing, Jan thought. Months after the battle, the Empire was still reveling about their great victory on Hoth and how the Rebel's terroristic threat was soon to be squashed. It would have been funny if too many of her comrades hadn't been killed.

A sound from the room next to her reached her ears through the thin metal walls separating the two. Jan dropped the datapad onto her lap and listened closely, hand instinctively reaching for the blaster pistol on the night stand next to her. The unmistakable sound of a door hissing opened followed.

The agent sprang into action, grabbing her blaster pistol and standing up quickly. Her discarded datapad hit the floor with a small thud. She crossed the miniscule distance between her chair and the refresher station in seconds and dropped quickly to her knees in front of the sink. Her hand reached under the metal basin and found one of the two holdout blasters that she had placed just hours before. The pistol came free with a quick tug.

She kneeled in front of the shower station, kneeling with one knee on the ground. She held her two blasters in front of her room's door, hands steady. Her breaths were even, drawing in through her nose and then out through her slightly open mouth.

The door out into the hallway hissed open and a she caught sight of a object being tossed into the main chamber. A second passed before a brilliant flash of light erupted through the open door, followed closely by a deafening sound that shook the walls.

"Move in!" The filtered voice was muffled through her ringing ears. The first stormtrooper rushed into the room, blaster raised and instantly caught the secured electrogarrote with his foot. With a startled cry, the vanguard of the Imperial attack stumbled to the carpeted floor.

Jan quickly aimed and squeezed off a shot at fallen stormtrooper, hitting the man in the chest. Another followed, stepping over the impromptu tripwire and his dying companion. His rifle was halfway towards her when the agent's next shot impacted on his stomach.

The injured Imperial fired off a random shot of blaster fire as he collapsed to his knees, the blue ring dissipating on the ceiling of the refresher. The thought that they were using stun settings hit her brain and caused her aim to waver only slightly as she fired a killing shot at the soldier in front of her.

She spun into the open shower stall, dodging another stun blast as a third stormtrooper entered the room. A few blind shots around the wall was meant to keep the Imperial at bay. The shuffling sounds of plasteel boots on the floor outside of the refresher increased as more stormtroopers made their way. The room was too small, too crowded to provide any real form of defense. Her capture was imminent.

Jan leaned out of the shower and fired a burst of quick shots at her enemies. They'd capture her, but she'd take out as many of them as she could. Ducking back into her cover, she quickly checked the charge on her blaster pistols.

"Clear!" The unfiltered voice of the Imperial soldier was followed by the clang of a metallic object as it hit the floor next to her. It was a flat hexagonal panel attached to a handle. The lines running from the center to the angles of the panel pulsed slightly.

A burst of light brighter than any sun that Jan had seen throughout her years of travelling the stars was followed by a loud explosion of sound. Her knees hit the shower's floor as her legs collapsed out from under her. Trickles of blood from her ears dropped warmly down her cheeks as she blindly crawled around looking for her dropped blasters.

Another spike of pain slammed into her gut, the kick driving the air from her lungs. Through the burning tears of her clearing eyes she spied the stormtrooper officer standing over her. He pointed his blaster carbine towards her and squeezed the trigger. A blue ring flashed in front of her, followed only by darkness.


	10. Chapter 9

**CHAPTER NINE**

The holographic image of a young woman crouched in a defensive position played in the air above the holoemitter. Ysanne Isard watched the woman fire a shot, the blaster bolt coming at the helmet cam in slow motion before abruptly ending, replaced by the feed from another stormtrooper.

Three dead stormtroopers and two more wounded to capture one woman. Her heterochromatic eyes burned and froze at the image on her holoscreen. Three dead to capture one woman that was surrounded by Imperials in the first place.

"How could you have done this better?"

The holographic image of Leco stood still and quiet. Isard stormed closer to the projector.

"You've had four hours to think of something! Tell me!" The agent at the other end shrank slightly at her words.

The lump in Daam's throat rose slightly as he swallowed. "I made the decision to approach at night, while Ors was likely sleeping, in order to minimize the risk of casualties and collateral damage. She was aware of us."

Isard looked down upon her errant pupil. "And how was she aware?"

"I'm not sure," Daam said.

"Don't give me that!" Isard's voice was as frozen as her eye. "I'm warning you and that is far more than some of the agents that have failed me have gotten. Don't make me realize that I've wasted my time with you for these past few years."

Leco Daam lowered his eyes slightly before raising them to meet hers. "I added extra security for myself when I was running. She must have been watching."

A faint smile curved its way onto Isard's lips. "Your own paranoia cost you the lives of three men and taken two more out of commission for at least two weeks. Was that a fair trade for the extra protection you had?"

"No, Madam Director."

"You think like an intelligence agent at the times you should think like a general. The Emperor is heirless and old and I need people who can think like both when the time comes. Every half-brained officer with a Star Destroyer will make their own bids for the throne and I intend to beat them all for it. Do I make myself clear?"

Leco stood as straight as he could and gave a confident nod. "Perfectly, Director Isard."

"Good." She stood from her chair, the floating holocam following her every move. "Get what you can from her and then send her to me." The conversation ended and she walked over to the large viewport that looked out over the Coruscanti skyline. The spires of the Imperial Palace rose large in the distance. Isard stared at the building and all it represented: an entire galaxy united under the order of a single being. Some day it would be hers.

She walked back to her desk, covered with datapads and reports from thousands of agents throughout the galaxy. Walked past the diagnostic screen on the wall showing the status of every system on board the 19 kilometer long Super Star Destroyer that was _Lusankya_ , the most feared prison camp in the Empire.

The alarm blasted it's shrill shriek with the ferocity of a Nexu that jolted Jan Ors out of what brief nap that she had been able to get. She waved her hand above her head, setting the alarm's motion detector off and killing the sound.

She stood up from the metal cot that she had been sitting on and stretched her legs. She had awakened from the stun grenade she had found herself in this 3 meter by 3 meter room, still wearing her Imperial uniform but everything other than the cloth tunic and pants were gone: her belt, rank insignia, code cylinders and even her hair tie. Anything that may have helped her take her own life in captivity had been stripped from her.

She walked from one side of the room, taking only two steps to reach the durasteel wall that held a primitive combination of a refresher and a sink before turning back and walking to bare wall. At the intersection of the wall and the metal door were five empty tubes of nutrient paste that was her only clue as to how long she had been in her cell.

Five days or one and a half? For one of her only clues, they meant next to nothing. In addition to the sleep deprivation they had to have been staggering her feeding times to keep her disoriented. All of it was standard Imperial tactics for softening up a prisoner for interrogation.

She sat down on the cot and rested her head on her hands, the wish that she could just shut her eyes and be able to really rest at the edge of her mind. At the other end of the cell, the empty food tubes blurred before returning to focus.

With a hiss that jolted her out of her thoughts, the door to the cell opened and a single stormtrooper walked into the room with his blaster drawn. Outside of the door she could see another standing a meter away from the entrance. "Get up!" The Imperial motioned towards her with his blaster.

Jan took a deep breath to calm her nerves the best that she could before standing up, steeling herself the best she could for what was to come.

"Let's go, keep moving."

The two stormtroopers flanked her as she walked along the corridors of the academy's detention center. The dark walls with red lighting gradually changed their tone to grey as they passed through doorway after doorway. Jan turned her head slightly as they passed a corridor, looking for any sense of bearings in the labyrinthine hallways.

"Eyes front." She felt the rough shove of the side of a blaster rifle hit her in the back and sent her stumbling forward before catching herself. She followed the stormtrooper in front, eyes moving around the area to survey the area as best that she could.

She was led through several corners and doors, each one just as unfamiliar as the other one. Entrances to unknown rooms passed by before a familiar sight finally reached her eyes: the red-lit hallways of the detention cells up ahead before she was led down the path to her right.

She was led through several other hallways, each of them slightly familiar as her captors attempted to disorient her, before stopping at a very recognizable door: the interrogation room. The lead Imperial opened the door, revealing a room just slightly larger than her prison cell. A metal chair was secured tightly to the floor, restraints on the arms and legs, next to a durasteel table. A large mirror spanned the entire width of the wall and half of its height.

"Sit in there." Jan took her seat and stared into the mirror, imagining that she could look past it and into the observation room beyond it. Leco Daam was certainly in there, watching as his soldiers restrained her to the chair.

It was her eyes that unnerved him. The thought invaded his mind even as her brown eyes seemingly stared straight into his soul. It was impossible, of course, for her to actually see him. The highly polished transparisteel was reflective on the other side and the rebel agent was merely staring at herself.

Leco Daam tightened his jaw and turned to the three students in the room with him. Cedral, Newo Tenes and Donlat Tascel were some of his better students, each one with promising careers ahead of them.

"I want you to pay attention to this," he said. "She will be a tough person to crack. She's had Imperial Intelligence training before coming here, as well as whatever training the Rebels have on their own."

"How should we approach them?" Newo crossed his arms over his thick chest and looked into the room. "Standard methods wouldn't apply." His lips moved downward into a slight frown. "Would they?"

"Actually, just the opposite. We exploit what they know because they know it. They have our techniques down so they expect what's to come and most of them fear it."

"She doesn't look scared," Donlat said in his high voice. The young man from Giehl had an unnerved look upon his face, not used to having to view the interrogation process.

"She will be." Leco walked the few steps to the door and opened it, the light from the hall pouring into the dark room. "Sooner or later, everyone here cracks."


	11. Chapter 10

**CHAPTER TEN**

It was an old spacer's tale that to stare directly into the blue tunnel of Hyperspace would drive the viewer mad. Beings weren't meant to view such a thing and it drove the mind astray. Kyle had never believed those stories.

He sat in his chair aboard the _Moldy Crow_ , feet propped up on top of his locked out command console and face turned up towards the clear transparisteel panels on the canopy of the cockpit. The blue ribbon above him undulated with brilliant white light that shimmered through the cabin like the sun reflecting off of a river.

There had been an artificial river near his childhood home, part of an irrigation system that carried water from a reservoir kilometers away through several of the moon's farms before ending in the capital of Baron's Hed. He and the children of the other local farmers used to play by the river, despite their parents' protests. He had fallen in once, when it was just him and his father's droid. While he was sputtering and struggling against the fast current, the usk-shaped droid reacted fast enough to save him.

WeeGee was likely disabled now, killed with his father along with how many of those childhood friends. The friends that he had met at the academy had fared no better. His defection to the Rebellion had cost him his friendship with Meck Odom, another young Imperial officer that Kyle had convinced to help him during the mission to Danuta. While Meck had complied, he had made it quite clear that he never wanted to see Kyle again. Another one of his academy friends was killed during his defection aboard a luxury liner, life ending along with his parents as a captured protocol droid exploded aboard their yacht.

People aboard the _New Hope_ and even in the commando unit that he had briefly been a part of had wondered why he was such a loner, preferring to take on missions alone or with Jan only. If they had the bad luck that he had with friends, they'd certainly understand. Now even she was close to meeting the fate that so many of his other friends had met.

The door to the cockpit opened, banishing all thoughts save for the present from his mind. Tarrin Datch walked through the opening and took a seat in the other chair. The pilot had a somewhat exhausted look on his face. "How far are we from the next waypoint?" Each Hyperspace jump had to be calculated from a series of waypoints, the best and most stable routes through the constantly shifting stars and space debris had grown throughout the millennia into trade routes that the majority of spacers used.

Kyle removed his feet from the console and unlocked it. "Two hours from Brentaal and then a quick hop onto the Perlemian to Coruscant. Then it's go-time."

"You're going to head right there?" The fear in Datch's voice was evident no matter how much the young pilot had tried to hide it.

"No," Kyle said. "You are going to get as close as you legally can to the building, though. I doubt we'll be able to get a complete scan of it, but I want to see it for myself before I do anything."

"How much time do you think we have to rescue her?"

Kyle turned around in his chair and pretended to check the console. "I don't know," he finally said. He knew that she was a trained intelligence agent, and was very likely trained to withstand torture if she was captured, but all of the training in the galaxy went out the viewport once reality set in.

"It's been four days since you brought me into this. How long before that were you contacted?" There was a pause in the young man's voice and silence fell over the cockpit of the freighter. "How did she get a hold of you that she was in danger?"

Brief silence was Tarrin's only answer. "You have to kidding me..."

The front seat swiveled around as Kyle turned to face the pilot. "I'm sorry."

Any other words that the rebel agent wanted to say were drowned out by Tarrin. "You don't know! By the Force, you don't even know..." The pilot buried his head in his hands.

"I'll drop you off on Brentaal when we get there. You can find a trip back to a rebel-held planet easily."

Brown eyes smoldered like embers. Tarrin pointed in ineffectual finger towards Kyle. "That's not good enough! You said it was unauthorized and I was fine with that risk, but now you say that you _don't even know_ that Jan's in danger?" The anger faded in his eyes and the pilot's face went slack, chin dropping nearly to his chest. "I risked my career for this..." His mouth opened and tried to form more words, a few stammers the only result. "I'm _losing_ my career for this..."

Kyle opened his mouth as if to say more, but turned around and faced the front of his ship. There weren't any words in the galaxy to console the pilot behind him. He looked at the console: still two hours left until Brentaal. He'd have to find a half-way decent piloting droid for the credits that he had and what parts of his armory he felt that he could spare to lose.

"How did you know that she's in danger?" Tarrin's paltry voice barely audible.

"I don't."

There was a slight scoff from behind Kyle. "I've been in Rogue Squadron and I've known some pretty reckless beings, but none of them would go all the way to Coruscant unless they were sure of something."

"It's just a feeling that I have."

"What kind of feeling?" The look in Tarrin's eyes reminded him of Mon Mothma's aide; curiosity mixed with a hint of knowing.

A laugh escaped from Kyle's lips, hollow and self-deprecating. "You're the third person to ask me that in a week," he said.

"And?"

"Look, I don't really like talking about it..."

"It's strong enough to not only risk your career with the Alliance for it, but others, too... That sounds a lot like someone I know..."

Kyle shook his head in disbelief. First Mon Mothma's aide and now Tarrin Datch. "And now you're the _second_ person to tell me that in a week."

"You've seen it happen, or the feeling that it would happen." The pilot continued. "In your mind."

"Look, I've already had this conversation before, so can you hurry to the point?" A look over his shoulder let Kyle see the serious look on the pilot's face.

"That was it, wasn't it?" Tarrin nodded his head either in a nervous tic or fully making up his own mind. "I'm still in."

"Are you sure?"

"I've seen Commander Skywalker have so many of those 'gut feelings' to know to trust them. You're no Skywalker, but you believe that feeling like he does. One condition, though."

"That is?" Kyle's voice was suspicious. As much as he needed the help of the human pilot, the word "no" was already forming in his throat.

"We contact the local rebel cells. If Jan was in any danger, she might have tried to place a warning to them."

Kyle mulled the thought over. Whatever her mission was, she might have coordinated things with the local cells before she moved. She always did. On their last mission to Coruscant, she had him memorize the current location of half a dozen rebel cells on the planet and how best to contact them.

"It's a deal."

Tarrin breathed a sigh of relief. "Good. If you get her out of there and you both make it out alive, you two better put in a few good words for me..."

A small laugh that never escaped the agent's throat was Kyle's only reaction to Tarrin's request. He had planned from the beginning to lie to the Mon Mothma-again-and say that Datch believed that he was acting in an official capacity to special ops. Whether it worked or not would be an entirely different matter.

The prisoner in front of him sat remarkably alert for haven't slept more than an hour at a time for the past three days. The skin under her eyes had the telltale puffiness of sleep deprivation but they still burned in silent rage towards them. Leco Daam had been unnerved just seeing those eyes staring in his general direction from behind the one-way reflective transparisteel, but seeing them looking directly at him was entirely different. The anger behind them, cool and calculated yet barely restrained, could nearly be felt.

"Lieutenant Shalmohar, Captain Strange, Commander Ecclin, Captain Ors." Daam placed the thin datapad containing the files of each of his prisoner's aliases down upon the table as punctuation for each one of them said. "You've got quite the collection of identities, captain, and these are just the ones that we've been able to find."

Jan Ors did nothing but continue to stare at him, a caged animal that would pounce if given the opportunity. Leco pulled the chair opposite from her away from the table and took a seat. Clasping his palms together and resting his bearded chin upon his thumbs, he studied her in silence. He allowed her to stew internally for a minute before he finally placed his hands on the table.

"You covered your tracks very well, captain," Daam said. "Most rebels who have infiltrated Imperial Intelligence weren't as careful as you were." He cleared the datapads away from the center of the table with the swipe of an arm. They clanged violently onto the metal floor of the room.

"I didn't get where I am by being sloppy." The Kuati accent that had been perfect down to the inflections on the correct syllables was gone now, replaced by an accent from the late Aldera region of Alderaan. Each and every word that she said dripped with venom.

A grin appeared on Leco's face, curling wide and open. "Captain, you're here because you _did_ get sloppy." He gestured towards the datapads at the side of the table. "You covered your tracks, sure, but not well enough to escape the Director's archives. Whatever your mission was, you waited too long to do it."

"You're lucky you didn't wait another day..."

Leco's face sank almost invisibly. "Yes, we found the rifle in a nearby building. Right next to a walkway overlooking where I run. A sniper rifle." He nearly laughed at the thought. "Not the best way to go about it."

The captured rebel agent remained stoic and silent despite the insult. Leco stood up and paced around his half of the room, the boot steps echoing off of the durasteel walls. "Let's skip the bantha fodder and get right to it." He stopped and motioned towards the mirrored wall behind him. "You've been behind that wall and you've watched me interrogate a prisoner. You know exactly what's going to happen here, already." He leaned across the table at her. "Here's your chance to avoid it all. The sleep deprivation, the interrogation droid, all of it."

His tone turned sweet, almost fatherly. "All you have to do is to tell us a few things: what other agents are infiltrating the Empire, what you were doing here precisely, and the location of the Rebel fleet."

"Go to hell."

It wouldn't be easy. That was a fact that Leco knew from the beginning but he had to offer her that out. She had refused and now what was coming her way was completely on her hands.

"You're quite defiant for your position. We know of your partnership with the rebel responsible for the ISB massacre and you're no doubt hoping for some rescue." He studied her face, hoping for any discernable clue and returned disappointed. "My facility here is very secure, believe me."

An almost feral grin appeared on his prisoner's face. "It's not him that you have to worry about. You better hope that if Kyle does come for me, you meet him before I get you..."

A chuckle escaped from Leco's lips. "You're not in any position to make threats, captain." He gestured towards the window. The sealed door opened and Donlat entered the room, carrying with him one of the storage crates that had been found in her quarters. "Speaking of..."

Donlat sat the crate down on the table, well away from their prisoner despite her restraints. "You wanted this now, Commander?" The well dressed intelligence agent moved back towards the wall and stood there. He fidgeted where he stood, eyes halfway down to the floor instead of watching.

"Yes." The top lip of the crate opened easily and was set aside next to the table. "Let's just see what you were up to."

Leco removed the three blasters from the crate and placed them on the table. The energy cells were removed from each of them. "Three blasters," Leco said. "One a standard Imperial issue DH-17 blaster pistol and two BlasTech HSB-200 holdouts. Some very nice blasters, two of which were used to kill three of my stormtroopers."

He put the pistols back in the box and removed the electrogarrote. "Nifty little thing, and good work on making this into a tripwire. Inventive." He placed the device back in the crate and continued his demonstration, removing and replacing the throwing knives and the detonator.

"And now, my personal favorite." He removed the electric toothbrush from the crate and held it up for everyone in the room to see it. A laugh escaped from his lips as he set the device down. "Pack something in the wrong place, Captain Ors?"

She made no move that she even recognized the item. "Forget about it when you found out that we provided toiletries for everyone here?" He handed the toothbrush over to Donlat. "Check it."

The younger Imperial took the device and opened the side panel. Leco overlooked the inspection, watching as the thick plasteel covering the power cell was removed, followed by the large cell itself. "It's a little larger than standard, Commander, and it's been modified to hold the cell, but I don't see anything." He grabbed a small scanner from his belt and moved it over the brush. "Scanner doesn't pick anything up. It's clean."

Leco held the power cell up towards the captured rebel. "Your little group has to make do with what you have it seems." The flick of a wrist handed it back to his pupil. "You can keep this. When you talk, and you will talk, I don't want a repeat of the last prisoner..."


	12. Chapter 11

The spacelanes around Coruscant were backed up to its furthest moon, the multiple lines of freighters, tugs and personal yachts each waiting for their turn to enter the atmosphere of the planet. In the middle of one of the lines, sandwiched between a flat-topped Lantillian Short Hauler and a herf-shaped BFF-1 bulk freighter, was the _Moldy Crow_.

"We've been sitting here for almost an hour..." Tarrin Datch's voice was filled with boredom. The pilot sat in the rear seat of the freighter, his hands firmly on the control yoke and throttle.

"Enjoy it," Kyle Katarn said. He looked around the cockpit's viewports as the spacecraft to their side moved a few meters before stopping. "The ride out of here's going to be a lot more fun."

"That's going to be a lot easier said than done." The younger pilot scanned the area. "It should still be possible."

"We can lose them." The sensor consoles emitted a series of fast beeps, showing in a neutral yellow the multitudes of civilian ships and freighters the single red shape of an Imperial craft. Kyle zoomed in on ship and brought up the holographic form of a forked corvette nearly ten times the size of the _Crow_. On the tips of the two forks were large spotlights. "We've got a customs corvette coming our way."

"Think they'll stop us?"

With the punch of a button, the blank hull directly in front of him was filled with a flat holo of the spaceway ahead. The corvette moved down the row, its spotlights moving from one ship to another. "It's supposed to be random unless they scan something suspicious onboard."

"And there's nothing suspicious about that armory you have back there?"

"The first thing that I put in it was the sensor scrambler that Jan gave me. It shouldn't raise an eyebrow." One of the spotlights on the corvette shone towards the _Moldy Crow_ , the large viewports instantly polarized as the light hit them.

"That's good for the sensors." The light shined through the cockpit, the dark transparisteel cutting out the majority of the brightness, but still illuminating the cabin. "What if we're picked?" His hands gripped the throttle tightly.

"Let me worry about that," Kyle said.

Tarrin scoffed. "What are you going to do, talk them nicely into leaving us alone?"

Kyle pulled out a number of brightly colored rectangles from his pocket and showed them, five dark faces reflecting the light from outside of the ship. "No, but Emperor Palpatine will..."

"Will that work?"

The credits went back into Kyle's pocket. "A quarter of their monthly paycheck in a day? Most will take it."

Tarrin shook his head. "We better hope that the captain isn't one of the honest ones, then. Rare as they are..."

The light that had been shining through the viewports vanished off into the distance and the open comm system buzzed. "Lantillian Hauler _X3S003572_ , please divert from the lane and submit for inspection."

"There's that," Kyle said. As the custom's corvette pulled its latest prey away from the other ships, the traffic began to accelerate towards the planet's surface.

Coruscant's skylanes were less congested compared to the narrow entry point into the planet's surface. A kilometer above the roofs of the tallest skytowers the _Moldy Crow_ soared amongst airspeeders and other space-faring ships. The many spires of the tall Imperial Palace rose nearly a hundred kilometers in the distance. A chill ran down Kyle's spine as he looked at the capital of the entire Galactic Empire, still large and imposing even from this distance.

With a few simple presses on a datapad, the overhead map of the area zoomed out. "The Academy should be about 50 kilometers from the Imperial Palace to the northwest of here.

"Patch it through to my console." With a quick movements, Kyle sent the coordinates to Tarrin's computer. To the west, Coruscant's star had began its descent through the large cloudcutters, peeking through the gaps between them. The lights in the large buildings steadily turned on.

"Are you thinking about a night attack?"

Kyle looked out the port viewport of his ship at the Imperial Palace as Tarrin passed it. "Don't have the time tonight and I don't want to wait another day to get this done."

Tarrin shrugged as best he could while still piloting the ship. "That works for me. You've been here before; did this place give you the creeps the same way it does me?"

"Not until I was ready to get out."

"I don't want to think about that part right now. There it is." The freighter slowed as much as Tarrin dared to avoid raising too much suspicion as he could. Two kilometers away from the craft was a large blocky building with two globular shield generators on top. A kilometer to the west of the shielded tower was a simple multi-storied building that stood out amongst the many courtyards and single leveled offices.

"There's a landing pad on the roof." Kyle turned and gestured to Tarrin. "That's your extraction point." The agent pointed to another building nearly half a kilometer away, under the skylane. "And that's where you drop me off."

"What do I do if they think that a freighter stopping to land on a random building seems suspicious and sends in a couple of TIEs?"

Kyle shrugged. "You'll only be at a full stop for a few seconds, at most. There shouldn't be anything to worry about, but if there is state that you had a brief power fluctuation in the starboard engines."

"And that'll work?"

"Long enough to get out of here."

The _Moldy Crow_ had exited the area and was flying around a small entertainment district. "If that's what I'm going to get, I guess that'll have to do." The ship banked north towards a seedy looking spaceport. "Now to keep your end of the promise."

"I've still got their numbers programmed into my comlink."

The stormtroopers's hands gripped tightly against her arms sent fire along her limbs as they dragged her through the hallways. She hung limply in their grasp, mind still foggy from the interrogation drugs that they had pumped into her system in a vain attempt at making her talk.

The toes of her boots scraped along familiar floors as they neared the detention cells. There was no bothering with alternate routes now, not with how out of it the prisoner seemed to be. The walk from the interrogation room to the detention center took only minutes without the costly detours along the way.

The floor rushed towards her as the two guards threw Jan Ors into her cell. Agony rushed through her body as her sensitive nerves overreacted to the sensation. The small doses that she had voluntarily subjected herself to while training in Intelligence had prepared her for the droid's toxins, but the reality of the full dose compared lightly to that brief taste.

"Here you go, rebel, the Commander wants you not to stink up the room when you do decide to talk." The stormtrooper's voice was followed by a loud clatter next to her right ear and the always odd sound of laughter filtered through a headset.

The door slammed shut behind them and Jan slowly rose to her hands and knees, blocking out the pain as best she could in her mind. "Step nimbly onto stage. Croisé into plie of the knee and follow with a..." Her whispered words faded out and she continued her mother's choreography mentally as she reached the toothbrush on the ground. A slight smile filled with weariness crossed her face as saw it. Her hand closed on the device as she moved herself into a seated position along the metal wall.

She sat there for minutes, holding onto the toothbrush carefully as she waited for the door to open again and all of it was revealed as some cruel joke upon her. They hadn't noticed, her brain raced. Both Daam and Tascel had examined it and hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary save for the slightly oversized power cell.

The panel on the toothbrush opened easily, revealing the plasteel cell cap and the inner workings. The bristled brush head was loosened and twisted off next, the metal clamps inside of the stalk retracted from the thin tab on the end. She scooted the brush head away from her and turned her attention to the power cell's shield. It was a simple white rectangle designed to keep the power cell from leaking into the delicate circuit board in case of corrosion.

She held the plate by her burning fingers and pressed down on it, using the floor as leverage. "Come on..." The plate snapped in two along the diagonal edge the sound of the cracking plasteel ringing loud in her ears. Through blurred vision, Jan Ors inspected the straight line of the plate. It had been designed years ago by some intelligence agent that she couldn't recall the name of, though she felt that she should, as an easily concealed weapon for agents behind Imperial lines. The end of the wedge fit perfectly into the empty slot where the bristled end of the brush had once been set. The side panel of the converted weapon was replaced quickly and the agent turned the vibrodagger on.

The blade hummed as the powerful motor inside moved it quicker than the eye could see. A tired grin crossed her face as she lifted her booted foot up onto her leg. She slowly brought the vibrodagger down on the corner of the boot's heel and watched as the hard bantha leather was shaved away in a small chip.

With the slide down of the normal switch, she turned the dagger off. The hum ended in an instant as the blade stilled in its housing. The agent pushed the pain away as she stood up, legs nearly collapsing under her weight. She leaned against the cool durasteel wall, using it as a crutch to reach her cot.

An hour. That thought was a beacon inside of her mind. The drugs would clear out of her system in about an hour. She laid down upon the metal bed, clutching her homemade vibroblade close to her side opposite the door. An hour before the pain of just breathing ended and a day, maybe a little longer, before the stormtroopers arrived to take her for another interrogation session. Her eyes closed despite the bright light and immediately opened as the blaring of the motion alarm sounded.


End file.
